If we find some of the women’s champions a little hazy on this matter, their confusion is as nothing, however, to the muddle-headedness of some of the reactionaries. I have heard one and the same champion of anti-suffragism (calling himself a Churchman, too) speak of the dominance of physical force as a “regrettable fact,” do lip-service to the gospel of Jesus, and add that he feared the world was not ready for it yet and probably never would be, and follow this up by the much more fervent and heartfelt declaration that it was “only just and right that men, who alone can enforce the law, should make the law.” Now, if it is right and just that physical force should rule, undirected by moral force, it is not a regrettable fact, and we need not seek to alter it. But this is not what anyone really means. Everyone admits that laws should be based upon justice and equity, and that they have no stability if this moral sanction is entirely lacking. Anti-suffragists say that suffragists deny the dominance, sometimes even the very existence of physical force. This is not so. We think, on the contrary, that it is too dominant and that man is sufficiently reasonable to see this, when, as is now happening all over the world, women show that they are not consenting parties to such domination. Mr. Norman Angell has pointed out that the modern pacifist does not deny that nations can wage wars; what he says is that war, at the present time, and between civilised countries, is “bad business.” I do not deny that most men could knock most women down; I say it would be bad business to use this power, and I believe that most civilised men would agree that it would be bad business, that they have no desire to rule women in this way, and that society will be much healthier and happier when men as a whole abandon the practice altogether. And the anti-suffragists who make such statements about men have so low an opinion of them that I am ashamed for them. Another frequent absurdity of anti-suffrage argument is the assertion that we wish to destroy physical force, and that if we succeed, we shall become the easy prey of other less foolish nations. Now, to wish that physical force shall be controlled by knowledge, intelligence and right is not to desire its destruction; on the contrary. There is no enemy of health and vigour so subtle and so strong as ignorance and incontinence. It is not love and kindness, temperance, soberness and chastity which sap a nation’s strength and make its young men to fail when tested; it is ignorance, or disregard of nature’s laws, the sweating and overcrowding of millions, the slackness and self-indulgence of those whom their more fortunate conditions should have made leaders of men. It is to the interest of men that women should do their work well, and under the dominion of physical force, of fear and compulsion, women can never do their best work.